Featured

Now that we are in the holiday season, take a look at the variety of programs offered at a branch near you! Take the kids to a storytime with Santa, watch A Christmas Carol live, prepare for holiday meals, and much more.

You are here:

Early Literacy

February 24, 2014

What do you think of when you hear that phrase? Some may think of reading together with picture books and talking about them. Some think of singing the ABCs. To others, it’s all about writing or drawing letters. While someone else may think it is making reading time playtime. These are all true. Early literacy is all about developing neural pathways, which all of those activities do, to help get your child ready for reading.

But for the busy family, just getting the time to sit and read one book can be really daunting between everyone’s schedules. While still a very important part of building literacy skills, books aren’t the only way to take charge of literacy these days. There is also a whole host of apps for tablets and smartphones that can help!

Take LetterSchool for instance. Your child can see the letters of the alphabet, hear their sounds, trace or write over the letter, and much more! This app does come at a cost.

If you’re just starting to learn to read, Hideout might be a great app for your child. It emphasizes letter-sound association and word repetition. What’s better is it’s free!

PBS Parents Play and Learn is, as you may have guessed, built for parents to play games with their kids. Games are themed around familiar locations like the kitchen, park, grocery store, etc. It even gives helpful literacy tips for parents throughout playtime so that parents can continue to help build their child’s literacy skills even after putting the tablet or smartphone away. This one is free, too!

When looking for apps for your child, just remember that the more fun it is the more they will enjoy it. Something too complicated for them to navigate—too many things to click—and distraction sets in; too little interactive features and you’ll lose them. They’ll be asleep in no time.

And for parents, you might also like the MCPL app to make renewing items, searching the catalog, and checking out items a little easier when you do get a chance to sit down and read together.